Welcome

Welcome to the Openstreetmap wiki project page for Scotland. This page collects some of the projects that are of interest to Scottish Mappers. We also list the projects where local groups have set up regular social meetings so you can have a chance to meet other mappers face to face.

For general discussion or to get in touch with the community, you can join the talk-scotland mailing list.

Social Meetings

In Scotland we have reasonably regular pub meetings. These are generally informal and relaxed, and tend to be in a pub, although there are also Missing Maps Project nights too. How regular they are depends on the local group. In Edinburgh, these are now happening monthly. Historically, there were meetings every 3 months in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and one other place, but this has not been happening recently due to lack of interest.

If you are setting up any regular monthly, quarterly or biannually meeting please add a note of them here.

OSM Scotland facts

97.9% of road names have been added when compared with the Ordnance Survey dataset (as of January 2014), with all council areas now >95% complete. Ref: ITO

836 bike racks with the capacity to accommodate around 6682 bikes are on the map

2540Km of cycle lanes and cycle paths have been mapped (only covers a select number of cycle way tags)

Ordnance Survey 7th Series

Some old Ordnance Survey maps of Britain are coming out of copyright, starting with Scotland. A project is running to scan and rectify these maps, then make them available to trace within Potlatch and JOSM.

Gaelic names

Many places in Scotland have Gaelic names - these are often shown on road signs in the West Highlands, and on street signs in some towns.
Gaelic names can be tagged using name:gd=* (with name=* for the name in English).
In places where Gaelic is the main language (eg the Western Isles), the Gaelic name can be tagged using name=*, with name:en=* for the English names.

The national advisory partnership for Gaelic names is Ainmean-Àite na h-Alba (Gaelic Place-Names of Scotland). They have produced place-name lists for several trunk roads and a number of areas of Scotland. These lists have been researched, and agreed with local authorities, so can be considered to be the definitive Gaelic forms of the names. Ainmean-Àite na h-Alba have been contacted, and confirmed the Gaelic forms of the names themselves are uncopyrightable, so are fine to use in OpenStreetMap.

An OSM rendering showing the Gaelic names, and a map in Garmin format, is available at OSM Alba.